Published in the Western Standard, October 3, 2005, p. 42.

Why the State Does What It Does
by
Pierre Lemieux

When will Venus rise in tonight’s sky? Why is the environment “one area in which the [Chinese] government has allowed limited activism” (The Wall Street Journal, Aug. 26, 2005)? Will Conrad Black be criminally indicted by the U.S. government? In order to answer such questions, that is, to understand the physical and social worlds and predict what will happen in different circumstances, one needs theories. One who does not have an explicit theory necessarily has an implicit one, often assembled from bits and pieces of fashionable, politically correct opinions. To understand what the state does, one needs a theory of the state. Why does the state do what it does? Let’s distinguish two broad categories in theories of the state. According to the theories of the first sort, a good state—that is, a democratic state or, at any rate, a state manned by good leaders—will produce good policies according to what the people want. The second sort of theory holds that any state will enact bad policies, detrimental to at least some people, except (perhaps) if its power and domain of intervention are strictly limited. The first sort—which we may call naïve theories of the state—assumes that politicians and bureaucrats constitute a better, more altruistic breed than ordinary people. It also implicitly assumes that individuals have exactly the same preferences, because that is the only way to give any scientific meaning to “what the people want,” as if everybody wanted the same thing. Naïve theories of the state cannot explain a host of observable state actions. The Canadian state now wants to legalize marijuana, to prohibit tobacco, and to extradite pot sellers to the U.S. Bin Laden attacks Americans, and the American state reacts by attacking Bin Laden’s enemy, another tyrant named Saddam Hussein. And so on, and so forth. The second sort of theories of the state—call them modern theories of the state—provide explanations for such apparent inconsistencies. One such theory is presented in Bertrand de Jouvenel’s famous 1944 book On Power (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1993). De Jouvenel explains why and how a state, democratic or not, strives mainly at increasing its power. Much of what the state does can be explained this way. Also of the second sort are economic theories of the state, developed during the past half-century. Often originating in the “public choice” school of economic analysis, the theories are called “economic” because they start with the assumption that politicians and bureaucrats are moved by self-interest, exactly as are consumers and workers, buyers and sellers, on the market. One economic theory of the state is developed in Anthony de Jasay’s 1985 book The State (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1998). It leads to the conclusion that politicians and bureaucrats will favour the clienteles that help them increase their own benefits and, thus, the power of the state; and they will do this at the expense of individuals and groups who represent a threat to their power. This is done without anybody being necessarily conscious of the process, by the sheer logic of the state’s institutions. War is convenient for the state, as it permits the establishment of surveillance and control measures that will help it do much more than wage war on external enemies. This does not mean there can’t be a just war, but that we can’t expect justice or liberty to be the state’s criterion. Among its subjects, the state will generally favour supportive, quiet, dependent, obedient clienteles, who accept or demand more state power, including environmentalists and court intellectuals; it will persecute independent, marginal and anti-political groups, including the eccentric entrepreneurs that it cannot co-opt. Who will be hit the hardest by all the new surveillance powers (financial information, searches, border controls, ID papers, Internet surveillance) acquired by the state over the past few decades? It is a good bet that they will be mainly among groups that are not good supporters of the state, especially those who can be crushed with impunity. Of course, a few naïve supporters will be accidentally crushed, but what are a few innocents persecuted compared to all the enemies of the state who will be neutralized?